I hadn’t heard of William Thomson. But on 16th August 1858 Queen Victoria sent a telegraph message to US President James Buchanan by transatlantic cable. Buchanan replied, “it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle.” William Thomson was the mathematician, physicist, and engineer who was chief engineer for the design and laying of the successful telegraph cable.
As an engineer myself, I really should have heard of him. In a way I had, because the SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin, and for his pioneering work Thomson was knighted and given a peerage, 1st Baron Kelvin. He was also president of the Royal Society.
Thomson was educated at the University of Glasgow, then matriculated at Cambridge aged seventeen. He was a true polymath who made valuable contributions to the fields of electromagnetism, geology and thermodynamics, amongst others. Whilst you can hardly call Thomson an unsung genius, his work was the precursor to the more well known geniuses such as Albert Einstein and Max Plank. Thomson was the first to formulate the concept of dark matter.
I find it somehow refreshing when a genius is wrong. I posted about Galileo’s fallibility, he didn’t believe the moon had any effect on tides. In 1896 Thomson declined an invitation to join the Royal Aeronautical Society, replying that “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of.” In a newspaper interview in 1902 Thomson said “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.” The Wright brothers made their first successful heavier than air flight in 1903. William Thomson died in 1907, aged 83. I wonder if he’d changed his mind about the potential of aviation.